Fortunately for India, there were good men and true at Peshawar in those days, when hesitation and irresolution would have been fatal, and it is worthy of note that they were comparatively young men—­Edwardes was thirty-seven, Nicholson thirty-five; Neville Chamberlain, the distinguished Commandant of the Punjab Frontier Force (who was hastily summoned from Kohat, where he happened to be on his tour of inspection), was thirty-seven; and the Brigadier, Sydney Cotton, though much older, being sixty-five, was not only exceptionally young for his years and full of energy and intelligence, but actually much younger than the average of General officers commanding stations in India.

At once, on hearing of the Mutiny, Edwardes, acting in unison with Nicholson, sent to the post-office and laid hands on all Native correspondence; the letters they thus secured showed but too plainly how necessary was this precaution.  The number of seditious papers seized was alarmingly great; they were for the most part couched in figurative and enigmatical language, but it was quite sufficiently clear from them that every Native regiment in the garrison was more or less implicated and prepared to join the rebel movement.

A strong interest attaches to these letters, for they brought to light the true feeling of the Natives towards us at the time, and it was evident from them that the sepoys had really been made to believe that we intended to destroy their caste by various unholy devices, of which the issue of contaminating cartridges was one.  The seeds of disaffection had been sown by agitators, who thought they saw an opportunity for realizing their hope of overthrowing our rule, maintained as it was by a mere handful of Europeans in the midst of a vast population of Asiatics.  This feeling of antagonism, only guessed at before, was plainly revealed in these letters, never intended to meet the European eye.  Some corps did not appear to be quite so guilty as others, but there could now be no doubt that all were tainted with disloyalty, and that none of the Hindustani troops could any longer be trusted.

In the afternoon of Tuesday, the 12th May, I received a note from the General commanding the division directing me to present myself at his house the following morning, which I accordingly did.  Besides General Reed I found there the Brigadier, Sydney Cotton; the Commissioner, Herbert Edwardes; the Deputy Commissioner, John Nicholson; Brigadier Neville Chamberlain, and Captain Wright, Deputy Assistant-Adjutant-General, who, like myself, had been summoned to record the decisions that might be arrived at.

This meeting was a most momentous one, and I remember being greatly impressed with the calm and comprehensive view of the situation taken by Edwardes and Nicholson.  They had already been in communication with the Chief Commissioner, and had, previous to the meeting, received a telegram from him approving generally of the several proposals they contemplated.  John Lawrence also informed them that the authorities at Lahore had decided on disarming the Native troops at Mian Mir that very morning.